


Drinking Soap

by dustorange



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 1968, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Vietnam War, insp by that post about if dave wasn’t klaus’s foil and was instead. like. just as wild as him lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-01-04 13:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18344243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustorange/pseuds/dustorange
Summary: “We should get married,” Klaus says dazedly, and he knows how crazy he must look: high as hell, pupils dilated into new moons, talking about shiny, sober things like marriage between two men, between Klaus and Dave, between only them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so i fell deep into tua and klave?? also confirmed jewish dave gave me life, so i hc that he lived in skokie so that’s where the chicago thing fits in :’)

The barracks have got to be the best place on earth. The whole place is warm, drunk on its own darkness, and it’s just rows and rows and rows of people. There’s a couple of them, ‘cause there’s always a couple, that are just there for the war, that are just there because they want to be, because it’s 1968 and none of them have had their rich daddy’s chimpanzee butler guide them through any fucking Vonnegut yet. But most of them are just there because some starry-eyed bureaucrat forced them to, made good on some long forgotten half-hearted checked boxes for the SSS. Dave, of course, is of the latter category. 

 

And Dave. His hands are splayed out over Klaus’s skin, like some little kid pressing his face up against the glass at a museum or an aquarium or a freak show, except Klaus doesn’t _feel_ like a freak here. Doesn’t feel out of place, not in combat or a war zone or a place where every other kid is an addict. Hell, Dave’s halfway to Mount Olympus, just as high as Klaus’s ever been in the muggy blackness of the night. Dave lets out a high-pitched giggle for no reason and Klaus laughs instead of shushing him.

 

“Boy,” he drawls. “You sure can’t hold your liquor. Or mescaline. Whatever.”

 

Dave thinks that’s the funniest thing since — well, Klaus doesn’t know, it’s the sixties — maybe David Niven. His face presses into the pillow, letting out an ugly, entirely-absolutely- _unequivocally_ uncharming guffaw like Klaus has never heard. It makes his heart hurt for no reason at all. “I swear I’m usually better than this.” A snort. “I’m from Chicago. It’s just — it’s been a while. My dad wanted me to get sober.”

 

“Oh,” says Klaus, and something in him aches. “...Chicago?”

 

“Well, actually, more suburbs of Chicago than, than, than Chicago itself, I guess, but Cook County.” Dave’s whispering now, suddenly hyperaware of all the bruised, dreaming footsoldiers around them. For a moment, Klaus feels vaguely let-down at the idea that Dave won’t just be real and loud and uninhibited. He swallows the thought, trying to Zamboni over all the discontent with the thought that the moment’s exclusive now. It’s just between them. Only them.

 

So: “ _Liar_ ,” Klaus teases. Dave’s hands feel so warm, so jittery, and if he squints hard, he can make out the curves of his face.

 

The soft, scant illumination of Dave’s face twists as he smiles, the light grazing his white teeth. “...Maybe I just wanted to impress you.”

 

And, wow, oh, wow. Klaus doesn’t know what to say about the way his whole chest warps, the way his heart flourishes and feels too full and too heavy. It’s not even anything — it’s baby-talk, it’s mortifying ninth-grade flirting, it’s something cheap you say to someone when they hand you a dime-a-dozen, fuzzy, red gift for Valentines, but Klaus has never had someone say it to _him_. Not ever. It’s the sort of thing that happened to, like, Allison. It doesn’t happen to people like Klaus. And isn’t it embarrassing, huh, that he’s thirty and this is — this is it. Still. He’s smiling so hard his face hurts, really, and it hurts bad. Part of him hope that Dave can’t see it. But the other part of him, it _wants_ Dave to see how happy he makes him.

 

Then Dave’s speaking again, his voice like honey or milk or Shangri-la. But Klaus can’t really focus, too doped, too spacey, and he just tries to follow the curve of Dave’s lips as he speaks. Dave’s still saying something when Klaus lazily presses their lips together, and the words he’d been delivering spill down Klaus’s throat in a soft, low hum.

 

Dave’s clean-shaven. It’s nice. It’s not rare, being in the US military, of course, but it’s still nice; Klaus, as usual, is out gunning on his own trying to keep his facial hair. Not regulation, and he wouldn’t even care about it that much — it’s not as if his sartorial aesthetic has much room for exhibition here anyway — except for the fact that Dave had looked at Klaus’s bare, pale skin and said that he hardly looked legal without the beard, which was an _affront_ if Klaus ever heard one. (It wasn’t even an invalid one, though, and that was the thing. That was why he grew it in the first place — bars tend not to let impressionable minors in. And that was saying nothing of Klaus’s terrible dilemma when he actually was too young to get into bars and his fake IDs were entirely transparent.) Still, there’s something pleasant and gentle and _unfamiliar_ about the smoothness of Dave’s skin. It reminds him — it sings to him, _This_ _is_ _Dave_ , _this_ _is_ _1968_ , _this_ _is_ _summer_.

 

Here, there’s no such thing as the Academy, and Klaus hasn’t even been born yet, and the apocalypse is so out of sight that it’s invisible, like a bitter, green fruit off of a tree that hasn’t even been planted yet. The months here pass like days, and Klaus can’t stop finding himself marveling that he’s been in A Shau this long. He’s never been anywhere this long before. He’s never wanted to be anywhere this long before.

 

Dave pulls back for air, and Klaus sighs, unbidden. Dave’s cheeks crease with his smile and Klaus gets pulled in, while his mind streaks back to being eleven years old, blowing bubblegum instead of reading about ethology, even as his siblings drone by rote about taxis, movement in response to some stimulus, such as light or warmth.

 

“We should get married,” Klaus says dazedly, and he knows how crazy he must look: high as hell, pupils dilated into new moons, talking about shiny, sober things like marriage between two men, between Klaus and Dave, between only them.

 

Naturally, Dave laughs, because this is Dave, this is 1968, this is summer; he laughs, because that’s what you got to do and because he doesn’t know any better, but he doesn’t do it to be mean. As with everything, as with fucking _everything_ with Dave, there’s something sweet and sentimental and _wanting_ in his voice. His voice is everything. “We can get a little place in Chicago.”

 

“Don’t you mean Cook County? Or are you still trying to impress me?”

 

“Oh, _always_ , baby.” Dave clears his throat, starts again, but now he’s too loud again, voice stark against the hot, still silence of the barracks, excited. “We’ll get a palace in Chicago. It’ll be the wedding of the century.”

 

A thrill fills up his veins, lingers in his mouth, tightens his throat; he can’t help the ecstatic little giggle that comes out, even before he has to be the responsible one here — and isn’t that just the surprise of all surprises: “Christ on a _cracker_ , Dave, you gonna tell the whole world?”

 

Another guffaw, and then a silence, and Klaus realizes that that was the absolute worst thing to say because Dave would tell the world. Through the pitch-color, he can see Dave beam. “Baby, the 173rd’s gotta know so they can RSVP. We’ve _gotta_ invite them —”

 

Klaus decides then that they’ve had enough time to breathe, draws Dave in again, as close as he can. He feels the cold metal of his dogtags, the dulcet stretch of his skin, the sunny pressure of his lips.

 

Honestly, Klaus is too high to even think about ghosts, about death or Ben or Dad, about hyper-competent assassins in blue suits. He’s too high to think aboutalmost anything. He does think, though, _I could die like this. I could_ die _like this and I could be_ happy _._


	2. negative liberty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s something about Vietnam that presses the secrets out.

“Hey. You know something?”

 

The dizzy green hum of the leaves; the clammy, soft clay of the ground; the elegant topaz slash of the sky; the hard cut of Dave’s damp silhouette, all high cheeks and dimpled chin and shoulders as broad as cardboard. That’s Vietnam. _That’s_ Vietnam. Dave’s voice is sweet. “Sure. I’ve gotta, right? I’ve gotta know _something_.”

 

“You know what I meant.” Klaus’s voice comes out a whine. He presses his tone down thin and low; it’s the day, and the day is meant for things to be seen. Things that are honest, things that constitute the world’s worst superpower, the like.

 

“ _Do_ I?” asks Dave, who’s a freaking epistemologist now apparently; his shoulder are loose against the sandbags.

 

Klaus is lying flat on his back, with his long regulation gun along his left arm, its end pressed against his chin. There’s no ammunition. The US Army’s too broke for ammunition. Serves them right. Bastards. Going around killing people for — well, Klaus isn’t expressly familiar with the causes of the Vietnam war, per se, but yadda yadda communism, while all the druggies at home were railing against it in the streets. Klaus likes to fancy he would have been one of those people in the streets; he’s already fulfilled half the criteria, is already a druggie. And it’s fine for Klaus not to have ammunition because he’s not supposed to be here. Hell. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the future — the big Sartre-esque _être_ be, not the _situationally present_ be, of course. His poor stupid teenage mother who sold her baby for a thousand Deutschmarks a couple minutes after she travailed had never meant for him to be.

 

“I see the dead.”

 

“Oh. Well. I mean.” Dave shrugs, fixes his fingers into a gun, pointing in a perfect circle. “Bang, bang, bang. There’s dead people everywhere, baby.”

 

“I don’t mean bodies.” He means the purple swirl of some twentieth century Desdemona’s popped eyeballs, the red swish of carved-out muscle against his childhood carpet, the heavy stare of a bird-boned cadaver. “Ghosts.”

 

Dave still doesn’t get it. Good old blue-eyed Dave. Good old _too_ -good Dave. Dave never saw a corpse before the war. Never peeled a sharp knife out a dead kidnapper’s throat as a favor for his favorite brother. Dave lets out a pretty laugh. “Is that a metaphor? I’ve never been good at English. Never got metaphors.”

 

“It’s—” Klaus’s throat gets tight. Maybe Dave doesn’t need to know after all. “Sure. Yeah. It was metaphor. And, I mean, buckle up, kiddo, ‘cause you’re…” He takes a second to swallow the sunken feeling, to replaster his go-to façade. “You’re here with a poet.”

 

“You hesitated.” Dave turns to him, cheeks creased like a good book. Like a really, really good book.“Why do I get the feeling you were gonna say something else?”

 

The familiarity bleeding into his words, the piquing warmth of his tone, it sends Klaus’s skin crawling. It’s not fair that he should Klaus so well. It’s not fair. But Klaus’s face still aches from smiling so much, and the sinking feeling effaces, cloud-like. “‘Cause I was. I was gonna say _fucking_ , but I thought you’d think it was crass.”

 

“Oh, man.” But Dave’s laughing again. “Engaged to is good, too, I think.”

 

“Engaged is better.” Klaus’s face is warm. Look at him. Shying away from the first real thing he’s ever had just because it’s real. He can’t even feel his fingertips.

 

“Better on my part, though.” Dave sits up against the sandbags, ducking his head. The perfect curve of his mouth presses upward. “I get to be engaged to a poet.”

 

“Oh, yeah. Great poet, me. Jenny Holzer’s got nothin’ on me, _baby_.” He stretches the last word like saltwater taffy into a good ten seconds. “Used to...used to write all over my walls. All my poems.”

 

Dave lets out another chuckle, a bald, startling sound derived from an MDM, or something like it. An enactogen at least. It’s sort of hard here because you can never know what you’re getting. No prescription labels in the lowlands. All the paper peels in a day, and it smears its ink within the hour. Too hot. Maybe _that’s_ Vietnam, too. The sound juts under Klaus’s ribs, slides a mail-opener around in his chest, but he could crawl into it; if he could scratch Dave’s laugh into a vinyl, he would, and he’d listen to it forever, day in, day out, through every film-run of the sun. “You ever write any good ones?”

 

Klaus’s laugh isn’t half so nice as Dave’s. Not half so soft. It’s bitter, Saturn-tinged, which is unbelievable, unacceptable when he’s in the presence of an angel like him. “Wrote a real good one once. ‘Boom Days.’ About this sick bastard, this billionaire, who ruined all his children’s lives, and none of them got to live happily ever after.” His fingers dance along the gun’s ridges, and his eyes go almost-closed, voice tilting quiet. “I don’t know. I thought it was good then. I might...I might rewrite it.” Slyly, he peaks one eye open, gazing at Dave. “I mean, at least one of kids has got to be bound for something okay.”

 

And that’s maybe not a metaphor, but it’s a message. But it’s not like Dave’s ever been good at poetry. That’s okay, though. That’s okay.

 

“You ever write any about ghosts? Geez. I wish I could write.”

 

Klaus presses his tongue between his teeth, grinning. “Yeah? What would you write about then, Davey-boy?”

 

“How much I love you,” Dave blurts. His cheeks rouge, a bright human-ish color against the stinging, dazzling green.

 

A rush of blood twangs on Klaus’s tongue as he bites the inside of his cheek hard, feeling startled and alive and more like a person than he has in a decade. But, “ _Nerd_ ,” he teases. “Way lame.”

 

“Why — you want me to say it again?” Beaming, Dave’s eyes go all crinkly at the corners, and, God, he’s going to have the worst wrinkles, the worst crowfeet, when he’s old and shit, which is rude, honestly, because Klaus is going to have to be the one looking at old Dave. He’s not even high right now, not even that high, but it still takes him a minute to — to, you know, let that sink in, to let the implication color him giddy. Dave’s voice is raising like it always does. “I’m going to say it again.”

 

“No, you’re fucking not,” Klaus throws back, skittering away like physical distance is going to forfend any verbal affection. “Not if I say it _first_.”

 

“ _I_ ,” begins Dave —

 

And the implication, of course, is that he’s — that they’re gonna be there for that. That they’re gonna get old together. Write stupid ghost poems together. And the thought of that traces shivers up his spine.


End file.
